Santoro Eugenio
Laboratorio di Informatica, IRCCS Instituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri, Milano.
Recenti Prog Med. 2013 May;104(5):179-80. doi: 10.1701/1291.14273.
Social media and medical apps for smartphones and tablets are changing health communication, education and care. This change involves physicians and other health care professionals which for their education, training and updating have started to follow public pages and profiles opened by medical journals and professional societies on the online social networking sites (such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+), to access scientific content (videos, images, slides) available on user-generated contents sites (such as SlideShare, Pinterest and YouTube) or on health professional online communities such as Sermo, and to use medical and health apps on their smartphones and tablets. As shown by a number of experiences conducted in US by health institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of Atlanta and hospitals such a the Mayo Clinic, these tools are also transforming the way to make health promotion activities and communication, promote healthy habits and lifestyles, and prevent chronic diseases. Finally this change involves patients which are starting to use medical and health apps on their smartphones and tablets to monitor their diseases, and tools such as Patients Like Me (an online patients' community), Facebook and Twitter to share with others the same disease experience, to learn about the disease and treatments, and to find opinions on physicians, hospitals and medical centers. These new communication tools allow users to move to a kind of collaborative education and updating where news and contents (such as public health recommendations, results of the most recent clinical researches or medical guidelines) may be shared and discussed.
适用于智能手机和平板电脑的社交媒体及医学应用程序正在改变健康传播、教育及护理方式。这种变化涉及医生及其他医疗保健专业人员，他们为了接受教育、培训和知识更新，已开始关注医学期刊和专业协会在在线社交网站（如脸书、推特和谷歌+）上开设的公共页面和个人资料，访问用户生成内容网站（如SlideShare、Pinterest和YouTube）或医疗专业在线社区（如Sermo）上提供的科学内容（视频、图像、幻灯片），并在其智能手机和平板电脑上使用医学及健康应用程序。正如美国一些卫生机构（如亚特兰大疾病控制与预防中心）和医院（如梅奥诊所）所开展的一系列实践所示，这些工具也正在改变开展健康促进活动和交流、推广健康习惯与生活方式以及预防慢性病的方式。最后，这种变化还涉及患者，他们开始在智能手机和平板电脑上使用医学及健康应用程序来监测自己的疾病，并利用诸如“像我一样的患者”（一个在线患者社区）、脸书和推特等工具，与他人分享相同的疾病经历，了解疾病及治疗方法，并获取有关医生、医院和医疗中心的评价。这些新的交流工具使用户能够转向一种协作式教育和知识更新模式，在这种模式下，新闻和内容（如公共卫生建议、最新临床研究结果或医学指南）可以得到分享和讨论。
